On October 7, a “nicht verstehen” action against “Putinversteher” and Putin’s policies was held in Bonn in front of the Russian consulate in Germany, timed to coincide with his birthday. The protest action was organized by the German branch of the “Party of the Dead”. Its founder, Maxim Evstropov, advocates the defense of the dead against the encroachments of the current Russian government. The activists placed a candle “for the repose of Putin’s soul” and wished him a speedy “day of death”.

The Party of the Dead emerged as an artistic and political project in 2017 in St. Petersburg and became known for its actions, performances and other events in Russia. The Kremlin authorities swiftly recognized it as a danger and began to persecute the members of the party. As a result many activists were forced to emigrate and now hold similar actions in different countries around the world. However, I think that such a party could only emerge in Russia and only in Russia the meaning of its actions is self-evident. It is connected to the special attitude towards death that is cultivated in modern Russia. 

Party of the Dead: The Cult of Death in Russia

Russia has waged wars of conquest throughout its history using the same tactics, ruthlessly expending masses of soldiers in suicidal attacks. This is the same tactic Russia is using now in Ukraine. What is surprising, however, is that Russian soldiers both before and now are willing to obediently march to their death over the corpses of their comrades. This willingness to die senselessly is linked to a special mood in which life ceases to be valuable enough to fight for. This special necrophilic mood is accompanied by a loss of the sense of life. In Russia it is somehow transmitted from one person to another, but outside Russia it is difficult to explain what it is at all.

Maxim Evstropov describes it as follows: “While in Russia, I constantly felt that many people are in a state of ‘derealization’. It seems to them that they are not really living, nothing really happens to them. And in general, everything that happens in Russia seems to be “not real.” Some things that are common for Russians are really hard to comprehend, especially for an outsider. And the ‘derealizer’ is a psychological defense reaction against the horror that is going on.” (Derealizer is Maxim Evstropov’s neologism, meaning a force or psychological mechanism that leads to the loss of a sense of reality).

Soldiers in the Russian army were always treated as expendable, but still the Orthodox Russian emperors believed that after death a person was no longer in their power, but in the power of God. However, the communists denied the existence of God and used the cult of dead heroes for their ideological purposes. Therefore, even now in Russia it is believed that if a hero survived, he is some kind of inferior hero. Only death can make a person a real hero. For example, pro-Russian propagandists used the fact that the Azov and other defenders of Mariupol surrendered and did not die as an argument that they are in fact false heroes. However, in the Ukrainian consciousness, real heroism is manifested not in death, but in the will to live, which the Azovites demonstrated by choosing captivity, which is more terrible than death.

The ideology of the Soviet Union contradictorily combined the ideals of a happy prosperous life with the cultivation of death and necrophilic symbolism. Soviet songs and movies cultivated heroic death, a mausoleum was built in the capital’s Red Square, and the Kremlin wall was turned into a cemetery. Even the coat of arms of the Soviet Union was created in the likeness of a tombstone wreath. However, in the Soviet Union, the necrophilic attitude occupied a limited place in the system of ideology and propaganda, without canceling people’s desire for a happy life. The current Russian authorities do not rely on any particular ideology, despite what many might believe, but instead promote such an idea of the world, in which the necrophilic attitude is expressed not in ideological formulations, but in a vague feeling that distorts the perception of events and devalues life. 

The difference between the necrophilic attitude in the Soviet Union and in present-day Russia is evident in the way Victory Day over fascism is celebrated. In the Soviet Union, death was glorified, but the holiday itself was perceived as a reminder of a tragedy that should never be repeated. Victory Day in today’s Russia is held under the slogan “We can do it again!” and has turned into a celebration of imperial grandeur, for the sake of which any human sacrifice is justified. A neologism has emerged to name this bacchanalia – “pobedobesie”, which can be roughly translated as “victoradness”, i.e. – victory madness, but it’s important to note, that the word “besit’sa”, to act crazy, has the same root as the word – “bes”, an imp or demon, so may be “victorimping” or “demonry” would be a better translation.  It is in fact a “substitution of the Victory Day celebration with a mad rampage of demonic forces”. 

In 2011, journalists from the independent TV2 television company in Tomsk decided to counter this bacchanalia of imperial grandeur with the “Immortal Regiment” procession. They naively hoped that if ordinary people came out with portraits of their dead ancestors, they would shame those who turn the memory of the war into a necrophilic carnival. However, the Russian authorities appropriated the initiative of the “Immortal Regiment” and themselves began to organize processions with portraits of the dead, not in memory of the tragedy, but in support of imperial ambitions. This was their way of saying: “Even the dead support us! Our power extends not only to the living, but also to the dead!” Only the fear that portraits of those killed in Ukraine would appear in the “Immortal Regiment” procession, and thus people would recognize the scale of military losses, forced the Russian authorities to cancel this necrophilic social event.  

No one has the right to appropriate the voices of the dead

The Party of the Dead opposes the use of the dead as another resource for power and cultural and political necrophilia in contemporary Russia, which manifests itself in a militaristic and patriotic death cult and the absence of a project for the future. Maxim Evstropov, the party’s founder states: “Posts in support of Putin are now distributed even from the social media accounts of those long gone. When votes are counted in elections, dead people vote. There were even cases when dead deputies voted in the State Duma. The dead are not allowed to be dead, the living are not allowed to be alive.” The Party of the Dead opposes this with a principle enshrined in its charter: “No one – no social group or individual living person – has the privileged and exclusive right to speak on behalf of the dead.”

To describe its activities the Party of the Dead uses the term “necroactivism”, which includes public art events and political actions in the form of street performances, where protest ideas are expressed through artistic means. For example, in 2018, at the May Day demonstration in St. Petersburg, Varya Mikhailova was detained for walking in the Party of the Dead column with the painting “9 Stages of Decomposition of the Leader”. It was a collage of a series of photographs capturing grass sprouting through Putin’s portrait. Varya was awarded a colossal fine for those times, and the artwork itself was ordered by the court to be destroyed, despite the fact that the work was a digital collage and not a physical object.

The Party of the Dead is built on anarchist principles. Participants of street actions could gather in one place, could act synchronously in different places and even countries, despite the fact that sometimes they do not know each other personally. The party lacks centralized management and the usual signs of organization. Its activities are coordinated either by its ideological inspirer Maxim Evstropov or by the initiators of specific actions. During the actions, the Party of the Dead members hide their faces with skull masks, preserving their anonymity. In this way they symbolically identify themselves with the dead. If the Russian state speaks on behalf of the dead as a usurper of power over them, the participants of the actions do not separate themselves from the dead, they perceive themselves as their equals, believing that in a sense, albeit symbolically, the dead themselves gain subjectivity through such actions and act as critics of the state, war, hierarchies and ideas, exposing the absurdity of power.

Persecution of the Party of the Dead in Russia

Until 2022, Russian authorities systematically detained and fined Party of the Dead members, but criminal prosecutions began after the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, when the Party of the Dead spoke out against the aggressive war and Russian military necropolitics. Many party members were forced to emigrate, establishing branches in different countries. The most active branches currently operate in Georgia and Germany. Those who stayed in Russia live under constant threat of arrest.

Thus, while staying in Georgia Maxim Evstropov learned from the media that in January 2023 a trial started against him, and in February 2023 the court decided to arrest him in absentia. I’m trying to imagine what a court hearing might look like. The judge is asking questions to an empty chair where the defendant, who has no idea he is being tried, should be sitting. The court-appointed lawyer answers instead of the absent person accused, asking to soften the measure of restraint, to replace the usual arrest in absentia with house arrest in absentia… Theater of the absurd! However, in Russia, the line between absurdity and reality has long been erased and now, it seems, everything is possible.

The basis for the prosecution was an anonymous message in social networks describing a then-upcoming action of the Party of the Dead, which Maxim did not even attend. Here I will provide the text in full and in its original form, with no capital letters, so that everyone can evaluate for themselves how insignificant a reason for mass searches, political persecution and criminal punishment can be. This short message is rather artistic in nature, as it uses the artistic device of alternating fragments of two different texts, one of which is an Easter greeting:

The author’s black humor, which is typical for the performances of the Party of the Dead, peeks through the lines of this message. I know Maxim very well, we graduated from the same philosophy department, we worked together, I knew his son and his wife, who was my student, and therefore I can say that the performances of the Party of the Dead, albeit in a sarcastic manner, express his absolutely serious attitude towards death as well as his existential, not just political, rejection of the regime in Russia. If ordinary politicians cover up their non-seriousness by imitating serious activity, in the Party of the Dead it is the opposite, a serious attitude to death and power is covered up by grotesque play and black humor.

Is the Party of the Dead a political opposition?

The Russian opposition is increasingly making me feel ashamed, but this is quite natural. After all, Russians have no common self-identification or understanding of themselves as one people, so there can be no all-Russian opposition. There are people who wish to identify as the Russian opposition, but are engaged in imitation instead.

Maxim Evstropov is not an oppositionist, but a political artist, an art activist. But he is also a philosopher, so he gives a philosophical understanding of his political activity. I respect Maxim as a philosopher, as a colleague, and as a professional – a candidate of philosophical sciences, author of scientific articles and monographs, but his philosophical language is very different from mine, and is not always clear to me. Therefore, I will try to present his position as I understood it, although he may disagree with my interpretations in some respects.

The political situation in Russia is such that the complete helplessness of the opposition only causes despair. Maxim explains that political despair is a situation of political impossibility, loss of hopes and illusions. It can be called “political death,” which is quite akin to the position of an animal or a corpse. This despair is total and becomes the background of every action and every thought. However, Maxim believes that the possibility of overcoming despair lies in despair itself. To do this, one must despair absolutely. One must despair in order to act. This is how “political death” becomes the starting point of political struggle. Humor is one of the keys to turning despair into action. When there is nothing left to lose, all that remains is laughter. 

Humor makes it possible to look at any situation from two perspectives: a serious one, where everything has unconditional significance, and a non-serious one, where all significance turns into nothing. Laughter is affective in its nature – it is an affect that exists both inside and outside of a lived experience, of a situation, it is a transcendence of the self, an outsider’s view. In the moment of ridicule, things lose their defined boundaries. However, in a situation of political despair, humor becomes black. It does not justify or legitimize political death in any way, but at the same time it opens a way out of the life situation into the space of freedom. Maxim believes that the “way out” of despair lies in a paradox: to get rid of despair, one must despair. Black humor lives political death and forms a new phenomenon with it, which we can observe in the street actions and performances of the Party of the Dead.

Let me give an example of how political desperation in a situation where elections are impossible led the Russian opposition to a dead end. Some members of the opposition called for a protest vote, others for an election boycott, and as a result neither strategy was implemented. The Party of the Dead translated this political despair into action and called for a vote for the dead, stating, “We remind you that this sub-fascist police state is essentially dead (strength is in truth, and truth is in death), it has buried its future, it is made up of apartment pyramids of corpses who still can’t admit that they are already dead. They will persist for a long time to come, but the soil is more persistent.” The black humor of such an appeal really broke down the boundaries into which the Russian opposition had driven itself. 

The philosophy of the Party of the Dead allows us to better understand what is happening not only inside Russia, but also on the front. When the AFU captured a bridgehead in the Kursk region, many hoped that the Russian command would transfer forces from Donbass to this region, which in turn would lead to a weakening of the Russian offensive in that direction. But nothing of the sort happened. Maxim Evstropov explains it this way: “It must be that the task of the so-called ‘special military operation’ is to seize and turn the Ukrainian territories into the ‘Russian world’, i.e. into something uninhabitable. In this case, the loss of its own territories (Kursk, Belgorod region, etc.) is of no significant importance for the Russian Federation, because they already represent the “Russian world”, i.e. they are not designed for life. The fact that some people still live there is more of an unfortunate coincidence from the authorities’ point of view”.

I call Russia’s current state system necroimperialism because it cultivates death and is unacceptable for the living. Maxim Evstropov believes that it is unacceptable not only for the living, but also for the dead. 

Photos: www.facebook.com/the.party.of.the.dead/photos_by

Translation: Sasha Starost